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But ‘gargantuan’ starts with a G. I don’t have any more G’s. Barbara said this as much to herself as anyone else. She did that thing she always did with her share of the yellowing, chipped tiles, moving them around in both hands and letting them make little click-clack sounds. At length she carefully drew two As and an N,

Their parents are old and frail. Their jobs are varied and demanding. Their collective geo-positions at any given time are a sparse matrix draped over a space the size of the planet. Their ongoing, mutually-exclusive elder-care opt-out game – that’s what I’d call it – has yielded no nash equilibrium in which the said parents actually get looked after. They’re

When Melden had been born, they’d gotten the standard media pack from the delivery center. They’d posted pictures immediately on Register and Soshio. Melden’s Soshio was standard fare for a newborn: little clenched fists, tiny foot prints and palm prints, button-nosed innocence swaddled in real knits. The whole thing was tethered to their own nodes of course, with little summaries

Whenever the doorbell rings, it’s Chrissy who shuffles to the door. She moves through the small apartment, ironing out her green tee with weathered hands, brushing cookie crumbs from there onto her navy blue jog pants. She lifts her palm to the access pad and it lights up. You can hear the noisy bolts rousing from their sleeping chambers. Chrissy

You install a looper from CRAX.inthe.wall that boasts a quad-lane, real-time suggestOR. You run it as soon as it lands. You go in and break out every colour panel you can find. You burn two hours just surfing the features. The dials and panels seem to breed with every blink and you’re running out of room on the old-fashioned 60

The lift makes a clanging sound and halts. After a worrying pause the doors bid farewell to each other noisily and begrudgingly. She looks down, finding that the 17th floor isn’t quite flush with, but gets out anyway. She’s deposited herself into a corridor that tunnels away in both directions. There’s a smell of a vacuum cleaner having gone round someone else’s

It’s the backbone of evolution itself, isn’t it? The thing off of which it all hangs: the inability to just rip out the guts and make everything anew, in the image of better thought-out things. For most intents and purposes, slates are never, ever wiped clean. But every once in a while, it can seem to happen. Which is why Jack

About

Tiny Tells are fragments / snippets of writing that I have accumulated over time. I decided to put them up here, a sort of online workshop for re-visiting and re-working things until they seem a bit more story-like. I might even be editing a post right underneath you! It's all in flux, so please leave some tips and comments.